Jim Croce is one of my all-time sentimental favorites, the first of several artists I fell in love with by picking up a CD I found on my dad’s bookshelf, putting it into my boombox, and pressing play. Croce released five albums in the 1960s and early 1970s, and almost all of his songs of…
Chances are, if you’ve had an Internet connection at any point during the six years, you are familiar with Portal. Created by the Internet-beloved Valve and shipped with a set of games called The Orange Box back in 2007, Portal took the gaming world by storm. Three years later, Valve released the eagerly awaited sequel,…
Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a very funny movie. I don’t think that is heavily disputed by too many people. Humor is also very, very subjective. I personally think Forgetting Sarah Marshall is an absolutely HILARIOUS movie. I love how quotable it is. Some hilarious movies (I’m thinking of Superbad right now) have great joke-packed scripts,…
I am writing this while the internet is down in my house, so this will be probably be short and contain factual errors. I apologize in advance. Final Fantasy is one of those cultural touchstones for people my age (mid-twenties males). So many of us experienced the series at one point or another, often spreading…
Reel Big Fish is my favorite product of the “third wave of ska” from the mid-1990s. Their brand of ska-punk features melodic, flashy tunes paired with lyrics often described as “sarcastic” and “bitter.” Their music could easily have degenerated into braindead party jams, but lead songwriter and frontman Aaron Barrett keeps it funny, emotionally grounded,…
It’s almost unreal how good animated movies have been the past ten years. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that some individual years have had a better slate of animated movies than entire previous decades have. It’s almost an embarrassment of riches. So where have these films come from? A variety of places. Some…
Some time around 2004, my family got iTunes for the first time. This was kind of a big deal because I never Limewired music. This was the moment that the world of music blew up for me. Suddenly, all I had to do was type in the name of an artist or a song and…
So I’ve spent the last ten minutes staring at a blank screen trying to decide what I could possibly contribute to anyone’s life by writing about the eight Harry Potter movies. This is the highest-grossing series of all time based on the best-selling book series of all time, an iconic pop culture franchise of ultra-scrutinized…
Mount and Blade, a computer game series by Turkish developers TaleWorlds, has some of the coolest game mechanics of any game ever. It has an unparalleled sense of scope: From tiny battles with raiders to eternal glory as king of an empire, the Mount and Blade series lets you live a medieval rags-to-riches story. You…
Have you seen The Usual Suspects? No? Then STOP READING THIS, queue it up on Netflix — assuming it’s still streaming… I feel like half the time I want to watch something there, it’s been taken down since I last checked — and avoid all other discussion of the movie. So much of it is…